Emailvision, the cloud-based marketing platform and CRM provider, is now SmartFocus after the company changed its name effective this morning.
“Our new site reflects our new identity and helps our customers and prospects understand how we can help them deliver real-time personalized marketing to all of their customers,” the revamped company website explains.
Why the change? Put simply, the previous name didn’t offer enough insight into what the company was doing.
Brad Wilson, SmartFocus CEO, also noted that the name ‘Emailvision’ was somewhat out of date with current digital marketing practice, saying he was “fully aware the name had to change.”
“In the last two to three years, we expanded our focus beyond email into mobile and into social, into websites, real-time technology,” Wilson told MarketingTech. “So we had quite the portfolio of cross-channel marketing automation within the company – but the existing name Emailvision really didn’t tell that story.
“You can imagine how our own company brand name was fighting against what we were delivering to our customers,” he added. “It was a good time for us to go ahead and rebrand the company.”
So why the name SmartFocus? Followers of the company may remember an acquisition of a software firm in 2011 by the name of…smartFOCUS.
Wilson noted that this name they were sitting on was a perfect fit – when good marketing company names were at something of a premium.
“The name SmartFocus uses the ‘smart’ piece around real-time analytics, and the ‘focus’ in terms of segmentation or real-time offer management. The name itself lent very well to support the kinds of things we do for our customers,” Wilson said.
“It was by far the easiest and smartest path for us,” he added.
Wilson has been with the company for seven months, having previously spent seven years at Microsoft as general manager for the CRM arm, being named as an “Influential Leader” in the industry five times by CRM magazine.
And he notes how this experience will shape SmartFocus’ strategy going forward.
“Microsoft is a wonderful place to sharpen your skills in terms of learning how to run a business at scale,” he said. “Anything we did there had to be built to scale in terms of the processes, the products.
“And so I think that in bringing that experience to SmartFocus is just the attention to detail – whatever you do, you don’t build it for one-offs, or one, or 10, or 100 – you think about how [you] deliver this experience 1000 times or 10000 times to my customers.”
The result is an ambitious plan for the next 24 months following the rebrand.
“I’d like to see us aim to double our customer base in 12-24 months,” Wilson explained.
“That may be too slow, it may be too fast – but I think when you think more boldly, it helps you really sharpen your perspective and get building for scale.
“It really makes you think hard and go ‘wow, I need to be really good at how I deliver my products, deliver my services, support my customers’.
“That’s my aspiration, it’s to grow this business significantly moving forward.”
Check out the new SmartFocus site here. What do you make of the rebrand? Is it the right direction for the company? Let us know in the comments…
